Microsoft’s first attempt at replacing XP with Vista failed miserably, since Vista had many initial issues and was so poorly received, that the brand was irrevocably tarnished. However, Microsoft’s second attempt with Windows 7 has been very successful, since it has always worked very well, even during its development phase and is well liked. Now, if figures from Stat Counter are to be believed, then Windows 7’s share of the market has climbed to 41.64%, while Windows XP has dropped to 37.20% - still a hefty percentage and one that Microsoft will be keen to see drop to zero as soon as possible. This means that Windows 7 is now finally the most popular Windows version after almost two years since the retail version was released on October 22nd 2009, with Windows 8 due out likely in summer 2012.

From a relative high of 16.88% in September 2010 and continuing a gentle decline, Vista has actually picked up a tiny bit and now sits at 11.73%. This is most likely because it’s still on sale, which is surprising. Apple’s Mac OS X has remained quite stable at around 6-7% market share and looks set to continue the trend, so shouldn’t threaten Microsoft’s dominance, at least not yet. Windows 7’s adoption will only accelerate now, since Microsoft has recently been pushing companies to upgrade from XP with the news that they will not be extending the operating system’s life any further and will be sticking to their statement that they are:

end-of-lifing XP and Office 2003 and everything prior, in April 2014.

Click to expand...

Please note that the figures quoted in this article will differ slightly from Neowin’s, since we have obtained them directly from Stat Counter, which is constantly updated.

It's about time. People need to let go already. I can understand in business situations, or people with old hardware, but anyone without mission critical apps that require XP, or a 5 year old machine or newer, should be off of XP already.

My company, which happens to be the only air traffic service provider in the country, just about now slowly updates to Win7. They thought about going to Vista but thank god they showed some common sense.

They just update slowly because all computers are in a very complex network environment, and are used for critical missions. You can't just shut down the entire air traffic over the most busy airspace in Europe just to install an OS.

Woohoo! I'm glad they are finally seeing the light! I'm usually one of the last to adopt new software. I just let the rest of you do the hamster job first. But W7 was the first time I used a beta OS and it worked flawlessly from the start. It's just a great OS overall...

Just for the spanner, I "downgraded" the awful netbook preinstalled W7 Starter to XP and never looked back.

Click to expand...

Yeah, but assuming you want with one of the full feature XP editions, that is kind of an unfair comparison considering you got Win7 Starter for basically free. If you went down to XP Starter Edition(and yes there was an XP Starter Edition), you'd kick your own ass for doing it.

It's about time. People need to let go already. I can understand in business situations, or people with old hardware, but anyone without mission critical apps that require XP, or a 5 year old machine or newer, should be off of XP already.

Click to expand...

I am sure everyone would like to move but keep in mind you have a company or school with 200+ pc's that is working perfectly with working fully functional software.
As you know they can waist a few million dollars on gimmicks instead of using it to pay their staff and hire new workers.

You are suggesting they should go and spend a few million dollars to reproduce what they have already that is working just to end up spending more money on some fake crap that needs attention in Win7 / OSX10.7 broken soft.
My systems cost me $0 and works why replace it and waist money on gimmick / Ipad's / iPhone's to end up being worse of than what I am now ?

That is business wise the stupidest thing possible, you have a good copy of adobe suite that has 10000 features and works perfect now you have to buy a newer adobe suite that has 250 features and you can not use your old Adobe suite and other hardware so you need to rebuild / reprogram everything to work with the new B*S* .
Never mind your Adobe suite was a suite now it is a suite with 10 the programs and you have to buy 6 other Adobe suites to get back to square 1 ?

Adobe / MS / Apple / crack cocaine / whatever it is just a example.

1x Imac we have will cost me USD$12k to replace the software should I get a new replacement Imac with 10.7 on it. This 12k does not include the hardware / training and 10% of the $12k software ability's I would be stuck with. So I would need to spend another $8k to buy extra software just to get back to where I am now that is costing me what $0 except for electricity.
That is what $24k to replace my current working Imac with the same thing and more bugs / problems ???

There is a few thousand other problems with the upgrade process, same goes for win7.

You can not expect too much from MS / Apple as they are not German / European and was not brought up with that values / culture / canning on the back side or the 15 recessions in the last 20 years as destructive in other country's as the 1939 USA recessions was in the USA.

So again why should anyone move to Win7 ?? for what reasons even when it is free "costing $129 per new pc free" That is why MS is giving Xbox's per new laptop just to get people to buy new hardware, see it as a Xbox bribe just to get win7 into peoples homes.

PS> this article is based on the fact that every new pc has to have MS win7 as undemocratic as that is and then 3 days later everyone switches back to xp or linux or hackintosh. Even with a new Apple for as long as I have been a Apple fanboy I had to get a Apple then format and reinstall to get rid of the junk / bugs and other issues so the numbers is not even close to being 1% changing to win7 and staying / continually using win7.

6 year old child did this math for me:
"then Windows 7’s share of the market has climbed to 41.64%"
So 41.64% of what 16 billions pc's on planet earth is running win7 that mean that nearly 7billion pc's has win7 on at say$129 per win7 copy that means that MS win7 is worth $903billion = $129x7billion and MS is bankrupt ?????

LMAO -> What about the 200billion copy's of MS office 2010/11 that is running on 90% of the PC's on planet earth that means that MS has another $3.2+Trillion dollars from MS office LMAO.

So MS owes the IRS USD$301Billion give or take a bit ? MS can not pay as this is not true and so the USA economy can not get the money to fix it / pay China back.

What is the IRS number they need to Audit MS !
I would seriously fire the board of MS as their investors is not getting their 14+% ROI that MS claims or the board of directors is pocketing the difference from MS bankrupt to + / - $901B + $3.2T and using it as bribes in Washington ?

am i the only one who thinks windows 8 has come far too soon (kind of 98se > ME) alot of people are only just now starting to get windows 7, i still come accross people who point blank refuse to change to 7 from xp after some goon/s told them complete rubbish about 7 or the other ones who think the earth is flat.

Then I think you'll love Classic Shell. It restores lots of little things they took out of the interface, such as the up button and the amount stored in the Recycle Bin. Been running it for a year and it works very well.

I liked XP - games ran great on it. but I like W7 because it looks better then XP. (im a sucker for Windows Aero)

And WarraWarra - Its only natural for some older programs that you used on a previous OS to not be compatible with the new one, that is progress my friend.

As for companies adopting Windows 8....I know a lot of corporate businesses that havent even upgraded from Windows XP/2000 yet let alone upgrading to Windows 7.

Its all based on productivity. If a operator can do more with the new OS then they will upgrade all their machines. Thats still a rare happening though. A lot of the corporate buildings I worked on were still running the old dells or CompaQ Pesarios that were housed in white cases and not the grey/black ones you get today.

no business would spend all that money to upgrade all their workers productivity. they would rather the software get phased out then dump the old machine if it proves to be too slow

no way in hell. If your talking about Desktop users only, then theres a slight chance, but so far Windows 8 is going to be incredible. Ive had the pleasure to play around with my neighbors Windows 8 tablet. (They work in the kernal for windows.)

Anyone else notice on that graph that Vista is rising a tiny bit again?

Can't stand the looks of Win7 personally. Pain in the butt to change things compared to previous. Took me longer to get a Win7 machine to look like XP than Vista. Never really had a buggy problem with it like others either. Guess I just don't use stuff that trips it up. But I do like that it's stock look is closer to XP. Like the black taskbar and Windows menu.